Provider, Specialty, State and Nursing Home Rankings

Top Specialties Snapshot

A live snapshot of the highest-population specialties in the NPPES registry. Counts reflect only Type 1 (individual provider) NPIs that remain active. Every figure is drawn from the federal National Provider Identifier Registry (CMS NPPES) - more than 7 million providers, maintained since May 2007, with 2023 Medicare Part D data, and, according to CMS, can be searched, compared, and traced in our methodology.

1. 1. Behavior Technician 545,400
2. 2. Student in an Organized Health Care Education/Training Program 331,274
3. 3. Mental Health Counselor 293,893
4. 4. Pharmacist 291,043
5. 5. Clinical Social Worker 274,526
6. 6. Physical Therapist 255,818
7. 7. Family Nurse Practitioner 210,832
8. 8. Speech-Language Pathologist 189,559
9. 9. Registered Nurse 177,204
10. 10. Internal Medicine Physician 172,737
11. 11. Case Manager/Care Coordinator 160,873
12. 12. Physician Assistant 150,974

How These Rankings Are Built

Every ranking on this page derives from a public agency dataset that is updated on its own cadence: NPPES weekly, the Medicare Part D file annually each calendar quarter, the NUCC taxonomy biannually, and the CMS Five-Star Quality Rating monthly. PlainDoctor does not edit, weight, or reorder the underlying agency metric. A ranking position changes only when the agency publishes a new file. Methodology details, including version numbers and exact column derivations, are documented in the methodology page.

Provider counts reflect the 1,370,886 active prescribers tracked in the Medicare Part D Prescriber Public Use File plus the 7,090,243 Type 1 NPIs in NPPES. The Medicare Part D file excludes prescribers who do not bill Medicare; many practicing physicians therefore appear in NPPES but not in the Part D rankings. Both files use the NPI as the primary key, duplicates and merged records are reconciled to a single canonical row.

On geographic distribution, raw counts always reflect population scale first and specialty density second. A small state with a robust training pipeline can outrank a much larger state on per-100,000 availability. We compute a per-capita normalization on every state-level page using 2023 US Census population estimates. Per-capita is the appropriate metric for comparing access across states; raw counts are the appropriate metric for understanding total market share or workforce supply.

Several caveats apply to all of these rankings. First, NPI primary practice address is self-reported by the provider; large hospital systems sometimes register hundreds of providers at a single corporate address, which can inflate counts in cities hosting major health-system headquarters relative to where clinical care is actually delivered. Second, dual-credentialed providers (e.g., a family-medicine doctor with a sub-specialty in geriatrics) only show up under their primary registered specialty code. Third, the Medicare Part D file suppresses any prescriber-drug-beneficiary cell with fewer than 11 beneficiaries to protect patient privacy, so low-volume specialty clinics may appear smaller than their actual prescription footprint.

For credentialing verification, follow each provider's record back to the source of truth: the CMS NPPES NPI Registry for active NPI status, the ABMS Board Certification lookup for specialty board certification, the OIG List of Excluded Individuals/Entities for federal program exclusions, and CMS Open Payments for industry-payment disclosures. State medical boards remain the authoritative record for licensure status, find your state's board through the Federation of State Medical Boards directory.

We do not editorialize, weight, score, or recommend providers. Rankings on PlainDoctor are mechanical reproductions of the agency-published metric, they are useful for understanding workforce distribution and market structure, not for individual clinical decisions. For care decisions, consult licensed clinicians, your insurance directory, and primary-source agency data.

Update Cadence

Each underlying CMS dataset has its own publication schedule. PlainDoctor's ETL pipeline pulls each agency's most recent release on a corresponding cadence, then rebuilds the relevant rankings. NPPES weekly files become live within 48 hours of CMS posting them. The Medicare Part D Prescriber file is a once-per-year release that typically lands in mid-Q1 covering the prior calendar year. The CMS Five-Star Quality Rating system updates every month with new survey cycle data. The NUCC Health Care Provider Taxonomy publishes a major release on July 1 and a minor release on January 1 each year. Any ranking position change between visits reflects an upstream dataset refresh, not editorial intervention.